Mixed monotone decomposition of dynamical systems with application

The notions of mixed monotone decomposition of dynamical systems are introduced. The fundamental idea is to make an elaborate use of the natural growth and decay mechanism inherent in the structure of a dynamical systems to decompose its dynamics into increase and decrease parts, and thereby to constitute an augmented dynamical system as the secalled “two-sided comparison system” of the original one. The corresponding two-sided comparison theorems show that the solution of the comparison system gives lower and upper bounds of that of the original system. Therefore, the properties of a dynamical system can be obtained through the study of its two-sided comparison system. Compared with the conventional comparison method in literature, the mixed monotone decomposition method developed herein takes in a natural way structural properties of dynamical systems into account instead of requiring strict conditions of (quasi-)monotonicity on them, and could yields refined, usually nonsymmetrical, state estimates, and thus is more suitable for systems with nonsymmetrical state constraints. As an application of the method, a sufficient condition is established for the global asymptotic stability of the trivial solution of a class of continuous-time systems with nonsymmetrical state saturation. The condition is given in terms of coefficients and state saturation levels of such systems, and contains as a special case a recent result on systems with symmetric state saturation in literature.